War Studies Research Group

This group is concerned with research in the area of war studies broadly defined.

This includes anything related to organised conflict from operational research, through operational military history and security studies to the accelerated social transformations that war brings in its wake.

We necessarily approach these issues from a variety of multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. We see the group as a forum in which to discuss emerging research ideas, present research papers, prepare funding bids, and coordinate public engagement events or outputs.

Forming this research group fits in well with our pre-existing desire to form a War Studies Centre at some point, and the metamorphosis of the War Studies Research Group (WSRG) into a Centre remains one of our objectives. Currently, the group consists of active researchers from the History, American Studies, and War Studies programmes, but faculty from other disciplines are welcome to join.

Members of the WSRG have published a number of peer-reviewed papers and monographs on War Studies related topics and are currently engaged in a number of research projects including:

• The social and cultural history of Napoleonic prisoners of war
• War trauma/psychology and US literature
• Shellshock during World War 1
• Historical counterfactuals and the application of statistical techniques to military history and strategic thought
• Civil defence during the Cold War
• British Commonwealth defence in the 1940s and 1950s
• Apartheid South Africa and the Korean War
• Conscription in Napoleonic France
• Britain's failed defence of the Netherlands 1793-5 and why battles are lost and won

Members of the group have participated in a number of recent funding bids, with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society.

A bid is in preparation for an AHRC award in cooperation with English Heritage on the subject of 'Managing Armageddon'.